Why the profit motif may have too many “unintended consequences”
I was just reading a New Your Time article titled “When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder” (Click on the title to read the article). It speaks eloquently about the problem of unintended consequences, the difficulty of being able to accurately predict all the results of our actions. Hence many of our very well intended [...]
CEO succession and Leadership
In my recent entry I spoke of the challenge of selecting a leader and what we can learn from the current presidential candidates. In a recent post by Idris Mootee “Visionary Leaders with Purposes Are Not Easy to Replace” he raises the example of Steve Jobs, the visionary leader of Apple Computer.
I loved his [...]
Big Teams - Barriers to Innovation?
In his recent post “Is Design a Team Sports?”, Idris Mootee discusses the role of the individual designer versus a design team. During that discussion he broaches the question as to whether large teams are barriers to innovation. I think that there is a semantic trap in the question, becuase it potentially blurs the [...]
Is Stage-Gate a Barrier to Innovation?
In a recent, thought-provoking posting on his excellent Innovation Playground blog, Idris Mootee posits that the traditional product development stage-gate framework is a barrier to innovation.
The following is my comment posted to his blog:
Idris:
When I first read the title of this post, the “old school product manager” in me reacted viscerally. Then when I read [...]
Leadership: The Philosopher’s Stone of Innovation…? (Part 2)
The other end of the spectrum re strategic decision-making is where it is totally driven by the leadership of the company. This is very often the case with start-up, early-stage and founder-run, privately held firms. The potential advantages are somewhat obvious: strategy is driven by a focused vision, factors which may not be effectively quantifiable [...]
Leadership: The Philosopher’s Stone of Innovation…? (Part 1)
I had the opportunity to speak before the Association for Strategic Planning this week on the topic of Innovation - an inherently rather broad and deep subject, so my approach was one of surveying the various paradigms of innovation (creativity/ideation, invention, implementation, value-creation, etc.), and that all of these conceptual frameworks for understanding [...]
Innovation Risk Management & Product Success Rates
In my earlier post on the potential traps of metrics-based innovation management, I noted that while a significant amount of innovation appears to be driven out of smaller firms, there is an underlying, Darwinian dynamic by which we only see the relatively small percentage of successful outcomes, as compared to the very large numbers of [...]
Forthcoming Talk @ ASP Orange County on Innovation
Just a heads up that I’ll be speaking before the Orange County Chapter of the Association for Strategic Planning this coming Tuesday (Feb 19th) at the Doubletreee Club Hotel in Santa Ana. Details and registration info are available here.
Here’s the promotional blurb on the event….
Most companies are aware of the need for innovation, and [...]
The Potential Trap of Innovation Metrics
“Be careful what you wish for measure … you just may get it.”
As my library of books on Innovation grows, I am seeing two somewhat conflicting themes emerging in regards to the role of metrics in Innovation. One sees up-front metrics as a key determinant of establishing efficient distribution of a firm’s resources across all [...]
Speed - Life In The Business Fast Lane
At this week’s staff meeting, we discussed an emergent theme from our conversations with clients and other constituencies - that of improving the velocity of organizations in executing across a number of dimensions.
In the area of new product development, the ability of a firm to accelerate new product introduction ahead of competition and within window [...]